Windows

General discussion

Adding A Second Hard Drive

After adding a second hard drive it should be drive D and my rewriteable drive E and my cdrom drive F. Inside it name the second hard drive F and the rewriteable D and cdrom F. I have tried everything switching jumper and cables around to no avail. Operating system is WinXp with service pack 2.

All Comments

You change the drive letters in the Disk Management only, but take care to change the drive letters in a proper sequence/order so you don't face problems with the other drives and CD Writer software you have.Best of luck.

Well, of course you can use Windows Disk Management, but if I were you, I'd leave the letters as they are. Because in Bios your drives have the correct names and if everything works fine you shouldn't jeopardize your drives. IMHO.

When I setup a Computer I always move any optical Drives to the end of the available Lettering system and then install the software.

Doing it that way you have the ability to add extra drives without compromising your current software that relies on a CD/DVD to read from to run.

As this is not the case here I would leave well enough alone or you'll find that a lot of your software no longer works.

The only thing that I'm a bit confused over here is the fact that you claim that both your second HDD and CD ROM are called F. I'm taking that is a Typo as you can not have two drives with the same drive letter I imagine that the CD ROM is actually the E Drive and has remained that way. But if that's not the case you'll need to go into Device Manager and change one of them around to have different drive letters or neither will work. I would set it back to what it originally was so the original HDD would have been C the rewritable D and the CD ROM E with the new HDD being called F.

If you really must have the HDD called C & D you'll be in for a world of hurt when you come to run any CD or DVD based programs as they simply will not work as the shortcuts will be pointing to the wrong drive letter.

Back in the days of DOS and the DOS based versions of Windows, 3.1, 95, 98, and Me, the sequence of assigned drive letters is just as you expected for adding a new fixed disk.

Windows XP changed that. Now, when you add a new drive (of any type) it is assigned the next available drive letter.

Part of the reason for this is to keep links in the registry intact. When you change the assigned letter for an optical or removable drive, any link to that drive in the registry is now wrong.

XP also does not change the assigned letter for logical drives like Windows 98 did when you add a new fixed disk with a primary partition.

So, for the most part, the changes in how XP handles drive letter assignments is a good thing.

The advice provided for how to change the letter assignments is correct.

You can change the assigned letter for every drive except the boot volume from Disk Manager.

Assign letters to your optical drives that are beyond what you expect to use for both fixed disks and removable storage such as thumb drives and external drives.(I use R for my CD-ROM Drive, W for my CD-RW drive, and V for my DVD-RW drive.)

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